Our tank does have 4p (which sort of helps for a pally, but not as much as a bear or anything)
Our DK can play unholy for AMZ and only lose 1-3k DPS.
We do have a feral druid cat/tank, would that be needed for the claw?

Now the final question that is really important, disc or holy? I feel with the amount of HoTs rolling with a resto druid and resto shaman that disc would end up being better in the long run with the absorbs, and that the PW:B would end up being better.

Thoughts/opinions and possible math for this would be much appreciated.

Again, thanks for all the great help!

Last edited by Holytravie; 2011-12-30 at 07:36 AM.
Reason: Forgot title

I personally tried it as disc and holy and disc felt way more comfortable and I did more healing with it, but that might be because of personal preferences etc.

Because there where no mana problems it was easy to get some absorbs on the raid with PoH before a bounce and shielding people before they get dispelled if they are low HP is nice as well. In P2 barrier is a nice CD to have. But I think it mainly comes down to what spec you enjoy playing the most.

I did it as both and we do not have the ability to have a single player soak an entire orb. We kept losing people during the 2nd or 3rd bounce of 7. So I went Disc and pretty much PW: Shield spammed and DA spammed to mitigate the damage.

Other than that, I think Holy works well on this fight. It was just the RNG of who got the debuff that kept messing us up. If it was only 1 person we would be fine, but if 3 people in our ranged group got it, we were in trouble.

With having 1 person soak orbs, this shouldn't be a problem and Holy should be able to heal this fight easily.

I did it as both and we do not have the ability to have a single player soak an entire orb. We kept losing people during the 2nd or 3rd bounce of 7. So I went Disc and pretty much PW: Shield spammed and DA spammed to mitigate the damage.

Wut? Your other healers must be pretty bad then if people are dying that early on, we had a resto druid (quit now, but now we have a resto shaman instead), holy pala and me and PoH/PoM was more than enough to keep everybody up for all of the bounces, I even had enough time to use atonement spec and smite while the ball was travelling (get 3-4 stacks before orb spawns, and there's enough time to PoH > smite/holyfire while ball moves between groups to keep up arch, specially if you precast PoH), I was only bubbling tank for rapture during this time. We managed to do it in the first week of heroic progress without anyone soaking, did 7-5-5-5. Our tactics for the boss are actually listed in a guide my GM wrote which I posted here, maybe you were using a suboptimal tactic or something:http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...-ozz-10-Heroic

On topic:

Both disc and holy should be able to heal this with relative ease. I tried Zon'ozz as holy in LFR (yeah i know i know) and it seemed well suited to the nature of the fight (stacking errwhere), hymn was a nice cd to have, but whether a optionally glyphed barrier(I'd prefer to take PoH glyph but that's just me) is comparable is down to personal choice imo.

I might try Zon'ozz as holy next week just for epeen, the rankings on it are pretty low imo, managed to pick up rank 1 on hagara last week so I guess it's pretty doable with good usage of divine hymn

Kind of hard to have 5 players at range soak and orb when 3 players get the debuff and fall to sub 50%. If that's bounce 7 it will definitetly kill you.

We did 7-7*-7**-5 with no soakers at all. Tried doing less bounces, didn't work for us.

What I was trying to say is that players would start dropping during 7* or 7** due to rng placing 3 debuffs on players in a single group, not that we were dying at the start of the whole fight. lol 7 stacks at the start is so easy.

Technically there was no problem healing it as Holy except in the case of bad rng of 3 players in either our melee group or our ranged group getting the debuff, so I played Disc and it went much smoother.

What I was trying to convey to the OP is that with a single person soaking, Holy could definitely be the spec he uses. I like Divine Hymn's shortened CD during the tentacle phase and the increase of healing from Test of Faith when players dip below 50% on that fight. Unfortunately I had to give it up but I look forward to healing that encounter as Holy in the future once my raid group smoothes everything over.

Anyway, what we do when that happens is our shadow priest (i save my grip to grip tank to claw spawn during first black phase) grips a melee into the ranged group (usually the warrior), if he's not topped he gets a sac from the holy paladin and then charges back into melee after the soak.

About the disc vs. holy issue, disc just seems better for this, like I said I'll try holy next week to get WoL ranks but other than that it just feels like it's kinda wasteful when you're not stacked as a raid for the majority of the fight. That said, I'm definitely going holy for madness heroic \o/

---------- Post added 2011-12-30 at 05:32 PM ----------

also also also! ♥

does GS work for soaking? I know it works on ice walls on hagara so you could potentially play holy to gain an extra soaker if you have none already, if that's what you prefer to play

As of patch 4.0.6 (Cataclysm major bugfix patch) Guardian Spirit has been changed!
Guardian Spirit: The absorb/heal from this ability can now never exceed 200% of the maximum health of the target.
That means if you have 100k HP and boss will hit you for 201k HP - You will DIE.
This change breaks many boss tactics on heroic versions within the first raid content.

Bah, was hoping to cheese some stuff with it during warmaster progression, no reason to not play disc now I guess, barrier's sick for large explosions and there's not really much stacking outside of that, arguably in the final phase on the melee but shockwave means too much rng and can't guarantee that

From our experience, the beachball phase is somewhat unfavorable for disc, but that's fine - disc priest can be designated as the dispeller. If you don't limit your behavior a bit to maintain aegis, the interval between bounces is too long for mastery.

The black phase doesn't really favor one spec over the other. Holy can probably only sanc right at the beginning and end of it, should have to lean on PoH/PoM for AoE, which would seem to favor disc some. Disc has pretty bad in-motion HPS unless you're doing PI bubblespam for movement, this aspect favors holy some.

You should probably be whichever spec you're better at. It's not really a decisive advantage for either.

no for real man it's awesome on zon'ozz, if you're running with sick healers you can get 5 stacks before every dark phase then pop wings for black phase, our holy paladin stands in the melee and handles melee dispels while i stand in ranged group and me and rsham do dispels there, it's not hard to heal at all really once you've got positioning and cd rotation on point.

What I did for the black phase (you can watch our kill from the Youtube link in my sig) was have our Resto Shaman drop Spirit Link on add phases 1 and 3 when we were stacked. I used PW: Barrier on phases 2 and 4 (last one with boss burn and lust). I decided on this because the +healing increase from the buff was going to be a lot more helpful during the end burn than STL.

Druid could Tranq on 2 and 4 as well. Save your Divine Hymn for the last stack up, probably after the effects of Tranq wear off.

Utilize Divine Guardian for orb bounces - probably the last bounce your melee group takes before you have a single soaker out in range and your ranged group joins melee. (We used Rallying Cry/Aura Mastery for this but only 4 people soaked melee bounces the entire time).

Are we really the only ones going 9-7-7 and then killing the boss before the 4th black phase? (+fire mage+shadowpriest soakers)

Also I don't how the whole soaking with debuffs is suppose to be hard? Just heal the debuffed people and ignore those that don't have the debuff, when the debuff is gone heal everyone up, heck sometimes I use pwb to faceroll through it.

We usually have me (the disc) standing in melee and the pala standing at ranged (60yd beacon is nice) along with the druid. I keep the tank alive (with beacon help) the druid and pala keep the raid alive. On the black phase the pala keeps the northern range up, the druid keeps the southern ranged up and I keep the western melee up between the claw and the western adds so PoH hits my entire grp.

I think zon'ozz favors disc. pre shielding for black phase plus cooldowns like barrier really make it good spec for that fight. also archangel talent offers some nice hps boost for black phase. but in the end of the day, both specs work.

random life advice #213: threat people as you want people to threat you.